It didn’t take long for Yifan Lu’s investigations to become useful for other hardware hackers! Our community member katsu, guided by Yifan’s precise description of the Vita’s NAND pinouts, was able to hack his PS Vita in order to boot from a previous firmware, technically performing something very similar to a downgrade. Check the video below, it’s cool and full of “electronics ***”, like your favorite cyberpunk movie.

What katsu did was dump his firmware 2.12 (on the NAND), probably using Yifan Lu’s technique. He then copied that Firmware dump to an SD card. In the meantime, he upgraded the PS Vita to firmware 3.01. On the video, you see him inserting his SD card in a reader connected to the Vita. The Vita then reads the content of the SD card (the firmware 2.12 he dumped earlier) instead of its own 3.01 NAND.

What the heck does all of that mean? First of all, that Yifan Lu’s little experiment in the hardware world is proving successful, by providing inspiration and documentation for other talented hardware modders.

Secondly, that downgrading a PS Vita is a possibility under certain conditions: what the experience proves here is that technically your Vita is able to go back to a firmware that was previously installed on it. This might sound obvious, but it means that installing firmware 3.01 did not “change” anything that would make the Vita backward incompatible with its previous firmwares. That’s something that eventually Sony could change, but for now this is promising.

Now don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean downgrading a Vita will become mainstream overnight! The hardware modifications required here are pretty big for now, and more importantly, this would only work with a NAND dump of your own Vita, as it is very likely that the NAND encryption key is specific to each console. One wouldn’t be able to downgrade to someone else’s firmware. What this means though is that today, someone with cheap hardware and the required skills could dump their Vita 3.01 NAND, upgrade to Sony’s next firmware to get all the benefit of the PSN, and boot from firmware 3.01 again whenever they feel like running Total_Noob’s Custom Firmware again.

Here again, I am making this sound a bit better than it really is. Katsu did not prove it was possible to write anything back to the NAND, just that he is booting the firmware from an external reader, which according to him takes 10 minutes. Not something very practical for now.

Nevertheless, this is pretty exciting, and could be the first (second?) step in some cool Vita hardware hacks. Let’s see how this develops!

Dont make statements you cannot accurately prove. hardware capability alone does not warrant any guarantee that any form of modern emulation is possible. my experience wih n64 on psp is horred at best. the vita in theory should be capable of up to gamecube spec, but wii emulation is jumping the gun a bit. even a high end pc has some issues using dolphin from time to time, and we are talking specs 5-7x the ones on the wii. psp, 1, and 2 are not improbable though. i even heard someone mention an xbox emulator before. the joke is that we dont even have a stable emulator yet for the pc, so that isnt a probability either.

While some people would like the Games Sony is coming out with, there are some people who look at those Games and think they are boring, uninteresting or even stupid. Mostly what Sony is doing is Re-releasing Games from the PSX and PSP. Example, the only Street Fighter Games are SF vs Tekken and those that were on the PSP and PSX. Where is the Street Fighter IV? What about bringing CAP vs SNK 2, or Marvel VS Capcom 2? Would like to see God of War 1, 2, or even if possible 3 on it. 1 and 2 is being planned on the Vita, but they can not say when. heck they could even take Hyperballoid HD or Magic Ball/Magic Orbz to the Vita. Or even Chicken Invaders.

Please keep such stupid comments to yourself. Toukiden, Y’s, Terraria, Terraway, Sonic All Stars Racing. Tons of good games have either just came out recently or are coming out in a few weeks. Just because you dont like anything thats coming out means ***, almost every genre has had at least one good game come out last year and better is coming this year.

Where’s the GTA III remake? The only close GTA game that we have on the Vita is Retro City Rampage. I was interested in Dragonball z: Battle of Z, but that game is like another version of Dragonball Z: Budokai. It has no characters and the fighting style sucks.

I agree I thought I was the only one who thought that Vita games suck *** I like the product but the games Suck. Japanese games in general don’t appeal to me at all in general. They’re made for 3 year olds.

You know that will never NOT happen. Look at all the Consoles that were discussed here on Wololo and see what the end results were. The only intention was to bring Linux or Homebrew to the Systems, but the Ultimate Result was Piracy.

Piracy is inevitable with hacking. It will ALWAYS be the result. How? Theoritcally let’s say the vita is hacked to play unlicensed games and use a USB to move homebrew from your pc to the vita. You can download the official games (although not licensed to you) on the PSN (ppl have already released some links to games but since no hack it’s useless for now). After downloading it you would then plug in your vita drag it and voala! You can’t stop it

Yup and its not all about pirated games im sure thats the big picture but how about customizations like ctf on psp i mean who wouldnt want that like ability to free up the volume max power etc.. Ios has jailbreaks and is still selling like hot cakes even 3ds has hacks now vita with cfw wouldnt hurt i think it will help

It is exciting wololo it’s also sad. I’ve posted about this before, that the problems of our little gaming world is part of the larger problems of the world in general. So until the bigger problems are solved hacking and piracy is going to continue and maybe escalate. And you can justify it anyway you like so you can sleep at night the fact is hacking for homebrew Always Leads To Piracy.

This is a very interesting find Its similar to ps3,nandroid backups, ios shsh blobs (for A4- devices) and booting a pc bios from a flash drive If the vita scene gets as awesome as ps2 and psp ill definitely get one ASAP The consoles scenes after ps2 weren’t as easy and awesome imho ,the ps4 and xb1 also dissappoint …..hopefully the vita will revive the old glory consoles once had , before they got overshadowed by PCs

is it possible to know the proceed about the boot of the vita, like katsu did, when the vita start, it will read the mem for the rom which already set by sony, if we can make the simily stuff instead the officially rom, properly we can do some downgrade or etc.

I Hope this don’t lead to the vita getting a firmware upgrade i have been buying alot of games from the store now that we can get back on it SONY please don’t upgrade unless it’s gunna hurt the VITA side im sure I’m not the only one buying mad vita games right now

Personally I just want to backup my games to my ms because: I prefer digital rather than physical BUT: PSN is 500x more expensive than retail eg (no joke im serious) Fifa Football at Warehouse (a shop in NZ) was $19.98 while PSN was still $98.99 or something like that (close to $100 tho)

Heyyyy and you know what After you brought physical for a while It’s broke and you have to buy a new one yay Not really It’s just i want to back it up but i can’t because of piracy The loading speed is really different from retail and second hand disc And then i just broke one (UMVC3) because of unknown problem

Anyone getting the feeling of the PSPs’ “Time Machine” app by DAX(?) where if you had a pandora batt with your psp you could eg. Hold X while turning on for Version 5.00 or Hold L for 3.71 or hold [] for 6.60 pro b-10 or leave for 6.60ME1.8? that was cool

[…] mentioned hardware hacker katsu a lot recently, first when he showed he was able to Dual boot 2 different firmwares on a Vita (and switch back and forth, which gave the community hopes for a potential downgrade), then later […]

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